The coronavirus pandemic is blowing apart the kinds of summer child care relief that parents rely on. Summer school is not happening. Summer camp is not happening. Summer youth sports leagues are not happening. The coronavirus makes it dangerous to dump your little disease vectors with their grandparents. Where the hell are parents supposed to put their kids during long summer days when they’re supposed to go back to work?

Middle- to upper-income families may be able to find babysitters or nannies once sheltering-in-place orders relax. But lower-income families—the families who most desperately need as many wage earners as possible in the household—are going to be entirely screwed.

…Working parents already hoard their sick days (if they’re lucky enough to have them) to cover a child’s illness instead of their own. I don’t think this country has thought through what would be required to make it feasible for every sick person or child to stay home when they’re feeling ill. Businesses might be desperate to resume making profits, but I don’t see them clamoring to give out uncapped sick days to their workers.

…There’s already some statistical evidence of the toll this gender disparity is taking on professional women, and we’ve only been without schools for a few weeks. In academia, we’re already seeing that journal submissions authored solely by women are down, while solo-authored male submissions are actually up.

The pandemic exacerbates gender inequalities still too common in domestic life, at the same time as it strips away supports women rely on to manage that unfairness. If women do most of the cooking, families can no longer supplement that domestic labor with trips out to eat. If women do most of the house cleaning, fortunate families can no longer supplement that work with domestic service providers, and many people have probably noticed that the house gets a lot messier when nobody can ever leave it. Working parents have more domestic work to do during the crisis, and yet have exactly the same amount of professional work to accomplish. That burden is falling more heavily on women, and it seems like employers and politicians don’t even notice.

The Men Pushing to Open the Economy Clearly Don’t Need Child Care

Pardon…. Who knew? I bet your wife did.

Also, if somebody always makes cutesie cut sandwiches, the kids always expect cutesie cut sandwiches. why the hell was was your wife OK with not only doing more work than you but taking on the extra work of making cutesie cut sandwiches when you didn’t even know what the kids ate, anyways? Co-parent, equal division of labor my ass.

Trump chloroquine push came after talk with donor, source says

Skocker…

…not.

Bush didn’t want to hear that there was a major al Qaeda attack coming to the U.S., even though he was told specifically that. Didn’t want to hear it. Rather than saying, “Tell me more, go find out about it, tell me what more we can do,” he reacted by saying, “Well, you’ve covered your ass now by telling me that.” That’s a very different kind of approach than Obama or Clinton, who were always looking for the thing that was going to bite them in the ass.

…None has been more derelict than [the Trump] administration’s failure to provide front-line healthcare workers with the medical and protective equipment they need.

What’s most exasperating is that there was a system in place to provide that equipment: the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile, an integrated collection of secret, federally-controlled warehouses with billions of dollars worth of precisely the kind of critical supplies that were needed in this crisis, such as masks and ventilators.

…The president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has said the stockpile was for the federal government, not the states. In fact, it was built precisely for states and localities to use in the case of an emergency. 

…The president secured money from Congress to put into the Public Health Service and the CDC to create a stockpile. A lot of it was grant money that went down to the state and county level, so they could have labs that would be able to detect and test. They set up a system so that when people came to emergency rooms and reported illnesses, that information would go into a national monitoring system. We realized that if a big event happened in any city, the city would be overwhelmed. So we set up a national stockpile of emergency medical gear that included medicines, hospital beds, ventilators, and put it in warehouses around the country.

We had a plan that when the equipment reached near its expiration date, it would be rotated, either through the Defense Department or Veterans medical systems, so that the equipment would be used before their expiration dates.

…The federal government doesn’t even have first responders. The stockpile is there for community hospitals around the country.

How Trump Wasted the Best Tool He Had to Fight Coronavirus | Washington Monthly

hmmm

The pandemic has made clear this festering problem: the US is no longer very good at coming up with new ideas and technologies relevant to our most basic needs. We’re great at devising shiny, mainly software-driven bling that makes our lives more convenient in many ways. But we’re far less accomplished at reinventing health care, rethinking education, making food production and distribution more efficient, and, in general, turning our technical know-how loose on the largest sectors of the economy.

Economists like to measure technological innovation as productivity growth—the impact of new stuff and new ideas on expanding the economy and making us richer. Over the last two decades, those numbers for the US have been dismal. Even as Silicon Valley and the high-tech industries boomed, productivity growth slowed.

…There’s plenty of debate over the reasons behind sluggish productivity growth—but, Van Reenen says, there’s also ample evidence that a lack of business- and government-funded R&D is a big factor.

Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation | MIT Technology Review

A family-run network of pro-gun groups is behind five of the largest Facebook groups dedicated to protesting the shelter-in-place restrictions.

…The groups were set up by four brothers — Chris, Ben, Aaron and Matthew Dorr — and have amassed more than 200,000 members collectively, including in states where they don’t reside.

…The Dorr brothers are known in conservative circles for running pro-gun and anti-abortion rights Facebook groups that bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars annually by antagonizing establishment conservative leaders and activists.

Their usual method is to attack established conservative groups from the right, including the National Rifle Association, and then make money by selling memberships in their groups or selling mailing lists of those who sign up.

…The Facebook groups started by the Dorrs each promote state-specific websites, which were registered with the same private registrar, and use similar language in their descriptions.

…The websites, such as ReOpenPA.com and ReOpenMN.com, were initially shared by the same network of pro-gun and anti-vaccination sites, [some of which were not in the same] region.

…The groups repeatedly warn users not to use off-site petition platforms like Change.org [which would not feed data back to the groups’ originators.]

…Their groups drive users to petitions on Dorr-registered websites, which collect users’ email and home addresses.

…This sort of Facebook activity is common, DiResta said, and it allows for a small group with money and media manipulation skills to simulate the appearance of a much larger movement. It also allows the group to harvest email addresses for future political campaigns, which can be bought and sold.

…DiResta said the tactics are often used to capitalize on legitimate political activism.

…”It provides an opportunity for someone who wants to piggyback on that outrage for, in this case, it seems like, outreach for future campaigns.”

Conservative activist family behind ‘grassroots’ anti-quarantine Facebook events

A sliver of what’s out there.